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MANGA AND ANIME NEWS (Updated Regularly)

Rules:
Post any manga related news that does not fit in another thread here. Remember, post any anime related news, including adaption announcements in the General Anime thread.destiny4ever
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Japanese manga "Wicked City" is to being remade as a live-action English-language feature
by Germany's Stallion Film with "Spawn" helmer Mark Dippe directing reports Superhero Hype.

The sci-fi/action tale deals with beasts from a parallel dimension and
a secret resistance organization trying to prevent the apocalypse.
The $50 million-$60 million budget project will lense early next year.

The original books by Hideyuki Kikuchi, bestsellers in the early 1980s,
were adapted as the anime series "Yoju toshi" by Yoshiaki Kawajiri.
Dippe and Johnny Hartmann are penning the screenplay.

Japan remains the world's undisputed manga monarch, but the way Japanese
are enjoying cartoons is undergoing a fundamental change,
according to Sunday Mainichi (4/23).

Though manga readership has been declining here for over a decade,
Japanese comics are more popular overseas than ever before.

Among the main reasons given for the decline in domestic manga readership
has been the proliferation of the Internet and mobile phones.

Now, however, NTT solmare has carved a tidy niche for itself after merging the
competing interests and its "Comic Site" has become the biggest mobile phone
site dedicated to manga in Japan.

"We've passed 10 million downloads since starting the service in August 2004,"
a spokesman for the Osaka-based mobile phone company tells Sunday Mainichi.
"We get about 2 million to 3 million downloads a month."

Yoshihiro Nakajima, head of Impress Corp.'s Internet lifestyle lab,
speaks of the impressive growth of the Japanese electronic book market in recent years.

"In 2002, electronic books earned about 1 billion yen. By 2003, that had grown to 1.8 billion yen.
But by 2004, the market was worth 4.5 billion yen. Of that, mobile phone e-book business
skyrocketed to account for around 1.2 billion yen," Nakajima tells Sunday Mainichi.
"Manga sales have grown phenomenally over the past year and it wouldn't be
surprising if sales doubled again over the coming year."

Ok, file this one under "Really stupid idea that would still make a billion dollars".
There is word going around right now that a live action Sailor Moon movie could be in the works,
and that the girl being looked at for the lead sailor herself is none other than Lindsay Lohan.
Oh my sweet heavens.

The good folks over at Cinematical offer us this:

The story comes from the Japanese magazine called Animage, who report Fox has claimed the rights to Sailor Moon,
and hopes to make a live-action, English langauage version of the popular story. And that's not all!
The magazine further reports Fox's desire to enlist the writing/directing talents of geek kingpin Joss Whedon,
and the acting ... erhem ... talents of Lindsay Lohan, presumably for the title character.

An anime feature film based on the Key-produced romance
adventure game "CLANNAD" is set to hit theaters in 2007.

The original "CLANNAD" game debuted in April of 2004, with a Playstation 2 version
released in February of this year. An official manga adaptation and several anthology comics have followed.

Many of the specifics of the film are as yet unknown, but it is somewhat rare for
a game-based movie to be produced without a TV series or OVA release first.
However, with past hits like "Kanon" and "Air", Key has amassed a considerable fanbase,
and it appears they are counting on the fans' movie attendance.

Responding to complaints from a parent whose 16-year-old son was offended by explicit sex scenes in a history
called Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (Laurence King Publishing), San Bernardino County Board of
Supervisors, CA, Chairman Bill Postmus has ordered the book removed from the library system.
(Postmus said the book had "obscene images," including "reproductions of pornographic cartoons depicting sex acts,
including sex with animals," though obscenity must be determined by a court.) County Librarian Ed Kieczykowski told LJ
that the book was purchased because of a positive review in LJ and that more than 20 other library systems in the state bought it.
He said he explained the library's selection and reconsideration policy to the supervisor and they looked at the book together.
Kieczykowski estimated that less than two percent of the book was sexually explicit, but Postmus "particularly didn't like the page the cartoon character was having sex with the hamster. He said, 'Do you think this is acceptable for our community?'
I said that we take the book as a whole, but I could understand why people would be upset."

So Kieczykowski agreed to withdraw the book. "This is one of those books that could go either way," he said,
adding that because the library system shares a catalog with the Riverside County Library System, residents could still access the book.
Postmus also was concerned that the book, though in the adult section, was near collections of comics that minors might seek out.
Postmus also called for the library "to draft a plan to protect children from inappropriate books and other materials."
Kieczykowski said that most residents have no quarrel with the library's procedures, but the library would look into the
concept of a J-card. Judith Krug, director of the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom, said this
was the first manga-related book withdrawal that had come to her attention. Librarians have asked for more finely
grained descriptions of the content and age-appropriateness of manga.

Last edited by destiny4ever; August 23, 2010 at 11:41 AM.
Reason: changed thread name and added new rules.

Re: MANGA AND ANIME NEWS (Updated Regularly)

Some random news about series ending:

1. Samurai Deeper Kyo, will end in Shonen Magazine Issue #23
2. 20th Century Boys, has already ended in Big Comic Spirits issue #21-22, the 22nd and final Volume will be on sale in October[br]Posted at: April 22, 2006, 08:31:38 PM_________________________________________________Wow, they're dropping like flies.

Re: MANGA AND ANIME NEWS (Updated Regularly)

Ok, file this one under "Really stupid idea that would still make a billion dollars".
There is word going around right now that a live action Sailor Moon movie could be in the works,
and that the girl being looked at for the lead sailor herself is none other than Lindsay Lohan.
Oh my sweet heavens.

The good folks over at Cinematical offer us this:

The story comes from the Japanese magazine called Animage, who report Fox has claimed the rights to Sailor Moon,
and hopes to make a live-action, English langauage version of the popular story. And that's not all!
The magazine further reports Fox's desire to enlist the writing/directing talents of geek kingpin Joss Whedon,
and the acting ... erhem ... talents of Lindsay Lohan, presumably for the title character.

Sailor Moon Movie News False (2006-04-25 15:11:20)
Several news sites have repeated a rumor that the latest issue of Animage reports Lindsay Lohan and Joss Whedon will be involved in a Fox produced live-action Sailor Moon movie. ANN has verified that neither the April nor May issue of Animage says any such thing. Joss Whedon is currently slated to direct the upcoming Wonder Woman movie, due out in 2007. No cast details for that film have been announced.

Re: MANGA AND ANIME NEWS (Updated Regularly)

Death Note Live Action movie uses Chilli peppers theme song

Quote:

posted on 2006-04-06 12:59:01
source: Sankei

Dani California, a song from the Red Hot Chilli Peppers upcoming album Stadium Arcadium, will be the theme song for the upcoming Death Note live-action movie. The Dani California video can be viewed in its entirety. Thanks Vitruvius.

Re: MANGA AND ANIME NEWS (Updated Regularly)

Some people are good at sketching. Others are good at drawing, inking and coloring. And others are good at story, dialogue and editing. That's why most comic books have a whole bullpen of talent listed. It's a team effort. Of course, you can do everything yourself, but that takes forever.

And now there's the added distraction of digitizing your images, either for reproduction or for Web use. It's a whole other layer of hassle, but it provides the best possible compromise of comic art production.

For those who just want to get on with the business of telling a story, there's "Manga Clip Art," by artist Hayden Scott-Baron and a host of collaborators. The book also comes with a CD-ROM of digitized images that can be manipulated to create your own manga.

In case you forgot, manga means, pretty much, "irresponsible images," a term the great woodblock artist Hokusai coined to describe the doodles he drew for his own amusement. These days, manga has become a kind of stylized, street-savvy comic-book style with fairly broad illustrations that border on the cartoony. "Manga Clip Art" provides a brief introduction, but it is primarily a catalog of the images on the disc.

The disc also provides a temporary license-free version of PhotoShop Elements, a kind of stripped-down edition of the classic bit-editing computer program, but Elements does everything you need it to here. The book contains basic instructions on image-editing and PhotoShop ins-n-outs.

It all works by layers. Each character has multiple editions of limbs, heads, outfits, guitars, monsters, robots, accessories and such. You click on the layers that best suit the character you're "drawing," make fine-tuning adjustments, then "flatten" the visible layers into a single image. This is then exported for coloring -- several pages are devoted to the art of coloring with digital tools -- and then the image is plopped into a background and dialogue added.

For beginners this is a gas, rather like playing with paper dolls. But the book also provides a refresher course for professionals in the digital-art realm. It can also be used to create storyboards for video production, and it goes without saying that the art here can be changed to suit your own characters, and the techniques used here will also work when you're starting from scratch. Oops, I actually did just say that!

On the downside, no word balloons are included, nor is there even any discussion of word balloons. To run it successfully, you need a Mac or Windows machine with a fair amount of horsepower under the hood. I had to use one of the artist's machines at the Star-Bulletin to accomplish this illustration, which took less than an hour from startup to save. Your plain-vanilla G3 iMac will chug.

I noticed that the illustrations are cleverly rendered so that the Paintbucket tool, used to fill areas, works without interruption. Shading and highlighting are easiest done with the Dodge/Burn tool. You'll also spend a fair amount of time worrying about color and textures more than anything else, but that's good for you.

I wonder if this is how "Garfield" is drawn.

"Manga Clip Art" is listed at $19.95 and likely provides more hours of fun than a $200 video game. PhotoShop Elements as provided on the disc is good for 30 days. The program is about $90 new from Adobe but was likely bundled with your digital camera for free. EBay prices averaged $20 for the program.

Seemingly foreshadowing the future, several Internet manga comic magazines have recently been launched. How will the trend affect print magazines, the conventional outlet that has won manga fans worldwide?

Consider the case of Comic Seed!

When a user clicks on an arrow on the screen, the next pair of facing pages appears, just as if the user had turned a page of a print comic magazine. Although this is entirely onscreen, the feeling of following the pictures is not too far removed from the analog experience. The titles include stories about a witch girl and about the computer game industry.

The current incarnation of Comic Seed! was launched by Futabasha Publishers Ltd. in April. The Web magazine was originally managed by another publisher from 2002 to 2005. Futabasha also issues about 10 print comic magazines and now distributes Web-only content on top of that.

Koji Shimano, the head of the company's comic publishing department, says: "Web magazines do not have printing and binding costs, so the total cost is less than half that of a print magazine. We'll create a business model in which we increase readership of the free Web magazine and make profits from ad revenues and sales of [eventual] paperback compilations of each title."

Also in April, Softbank Creative Corp. launched Blood magazine in three forms: a print monthly magazine, paid distribution via cell phone Internet service and a Web magazine. The multimedia debut aims to draw attention as well as to prompt the further development of technology to digitally process manuscripts.

The company is eyeing distributing more manga through various media in the long run.

Blood Editor in Chief Naohiro Nakamoto says: "Most manga manuscripts are still analog [handwritten on paper], and it's behind other publishing fields. If we could have them in digital format from the beginning, it would be easy to distribute overseas."

Behind the trend is the shrinking print magazine market and the expansion of digital comics on cell phones and personal computers.

Sales of print comic magazines have decreased for 10 consecutive years. The figure was 242 billion yen in 2005, down five percent from the previous year. Paperback comic book sales overtook magazines for the first time that year, hitting 260 billion yen.

Publishers continue the operation of print comic magazines, even though many of them are in the red, for the sake of publishing paperback compilations of hit titles from the magazines.

Meanwhile, according to the Institute of Internet Lifestyle, an arm of publisher Impress, the electronic book market in fiscal 2005 is expected to double from the previous year, to about 9 billion yen. One of the significant growth factors in the field is digital comics that can be seen on cell phone screens.

Shogakukan Inc. is on its way to fully digitizing its 20,000 comics. Senior manager Katsumi Amakasu says: "There's an increasing demand from the readers that they want to buy only the titles they want to read."

By contrast, a typical print magazine contains the latest installments of multiple unrelated stories by various artists and writers, although all from the same publisher.

"A Web comic magazine that gathers the titles they want to read even across publishers' boundaries may emerge some day," Amakasu predicts.

So, will Web and mobile manga ever overtake print manga?

Manga critic Yoshihiro Yonezawa says: "The way of reading Japanese manga has developed along with print magazines, which have high degree of freedom. Transition to the Net is unlikely to happen anytime soon."

As more and more young people get used to reading on a screen, the real issue seems to be how to create new forms of expression that will exploit the potential of digital distribution.
(May. 20, 2006)

May 3, 2006 - IGN FilmForce first reported a few weeks ago that the cast of the live-action Transformers movie was shaping up to be quite an ensemble, with the likes of Oscar winner Jon Voight, Josh Duhamel, Bernie Mac and John Turturro leading the contenders to play the human roles in the film.

Variety has confirmed that Voight has been cast, and "Josh Duhamel, Bernie Mac, John Turturro, Megan Fox and John Robinson are expected to round out the cast. Travis Van Winkle and Shia LeBeouf have already been announced."

The trade adds that "many of the rumored names are not likely to end up in the film." Well, by Variety's own count 7 of the 10 names we mentioned (excluding Michael Clarke Duncan, Tyrese and Rachael Taylor) are now confirmed so that can hardly qualify as "many." That darn "new math" must be to blame.

The DreamWorks-Paramount project, which bears a $100+ million price tag, starts filming later this month under the direction of Michael Bay.

April 24, 2006 - According to The Hollywood Reporter, the long-awaited, live-action feature film version of
Star Blazers has found new life in Hollywood. The trade reports that Benderspink and producer Josh C. Kline
are the latest collaborators to try to bring the 1970s anime classic, a.k.a. Space Battleship Yamato, to the silver screen.

Disney had developed a live-action version of the franchise during the 1990s, scripted by Tab Murphy, but that eventually fell apart.

Benderspink and Kline are on the hunt for a new screenwriter. The film will be produced by Kline, JC Spink and Chris Bender; Brian Spink will co-produce.

As THR reminds us, "The story is set in the 22nd century after an alien attack on Earth has forced survivors to live in underground cities.
After a message arrives from a distant planet promising a cure for the proliferating surface radiation,
Earth's last vestige of hope rests on the crew of a powerful yet untested spaceship,
which must reach the purported new ally and return home before mankind ceases to exist."

_________________________________________________

Man pinched for staying at manga cafe for 34 days without paying bill
From : Mainichi Daily News

Mainichi Daily News are running an interesting article about a Japanese man
that decided to live in a manga cafe after running out of money. This case happened in Gifu Japan where
the man lived in the Manga cafe for 34 days without paying for it.

Manga cafe's are places where you can rent a small private room (about the size of a cubicle) for a set length of time.
Most of these establishments have large libraries of manga you can browse and read at your own leisure during your stay.
They are open 24 hours a day and provide some food, and sometimes common ammenities like showers.

The man was lucky enough to stay 34 days in the Manga Cafe and racked up a bill of about $1500.
He was arrested a couple of days ago by the police for fraud.

_________________________________________________

A man who stayed at a comic-book cafe in Gifu for over a month and ate there
without paying was arrested Wednesday, police said.

The unemployed man, referring to himself as Kiyoshi Ikeda, 37, was arrested for fraud.
He has reportedly admitted having stayed at the cafe intentionally.

"I ran out of money and I thought I'd stay there until I got kicked out," he was quoted as telling police.

Investigators accuse Ikeda of staying at the cafe in Gifu for 34 days from March 10 until the predawn hours
of Wednesday and eating and drinking there with no intention of paying. He allegedly failed to pay about 150,000 yen in fees.

The manga cafe where Ikeda stayed was open 24 hours a day.
He reportedly lived in a room at the cafe costing 1,000 yen for nine hours.
After ordering a grilled beef dinner on March 10, he reportedly survived on only coffee and toast every morning.
The room had a sofa and a washbasin, which he reportedly used to wash his underwear.

Ikeda had been a regular visitor to the cafe since about January.
His long stay didn't arouse suspicion because the staff members worked on shifts.
Workers reportedly failed to notice that he wasn't keeping up with payments.

The cafe handed him over to police after asking him to pay a bill on Wednesday
and discovering that he was carrying only 16 yen. (Mainichi)

Post any manga related news that does not fit in another thread here. Remember, post any anime related news, including adaption announcements in the General Anime thread.

Freesia to end in issue 10 of IKKI, on sale 8/25.
Nodame Cantobile to end in the next issue of Kiss, on sale October 10th.

Source: Anime News Network.
Akita Shoten has announced a partnership with Kodansha for domestic and international copyright. They will cosign part of their copyright business for manga to Kodansha in order to take advantage of Kodansha's larger market share and licensing no how in hopes of expanding their international licensing and anime adaptions. Kodansha is Japans largest publisher, Akita Shoten mostly publishes manga.

Kodansha confirmed their plans to directly publish manga in the U.S. For the time being they will focus on back catalog; as previously announced they will begin by reissuing Akira and Ghost in the Shell. As of right now there are no plans to directly release newer titles or exclusively release manga through Kodansha U.S.A. That said they did not extend their licensing agreement with Tokyopop and their contratct with Del Ray expires after 2010.